Preserving AmericanOvermatch at Zero-Hour.
Dresden Codex builds products to augment decision making, tighten the kill chain, and enable the warfighter.
Protecting the United States and her allies
The Challenge
Data in a sensor-driven environment overloads decision making, but also provides an immense opportunity for actionable intelligence.
Unclassified
GSD 0.4 m · RngSlant range 18.2 km · Elev 31° · Frame 0417
Unclassified
An aerial photograph of an island airfield, framed as a notional surveillance image and marked unclassified, with an analyst’s sketch over it: a sensor site to watch, targets ringed on the runway and the aircraft shelters, a no-strike area round the housing, and the routes in. Under it, the kill chain: find, fix, track, target, engage, assess. An arrow leads from the sketch to the decision it serves.
Our mission is to make analytical reasoning and decision making faster and more precise, so the U.S. can win today and tomorrow.
Lineage
The Evolution of Decision Making
1949
Sherman Kent argues in print that analysis is a research discipline, not a byproduct.
1951
National Intelligence Estimate 29-51 judged a Soviet-bloc attack on Yugoslavia in 1951 “a serious possibility”. Kent meant 65% odds. Policy makers read “serious possibility” as far lower, and his own Board had meant anything from 20% to 80%. This was the beginning of Estimative Language.
1962
Special National Intelligence Estimate 85-3-62 judged that the Soviets would not install strategic missiles in Cuba because it was too risky and out of character. In fact, Soviet ships already had delivered substantial military equipment and medium-range ballistic missiles.
1973
“The Konseptzia” (the Concept): Israeli military intelligence failed to incorporate data that disproved its working hypothesis that Egypt would not go to war until it could strike Israel's air force in depth.
1999
Richards J. Heuer maps cognitive bias onto the intelligence cycle.
2001–2021
Two decades of irregular warfare narrow the discipline to find, fix, finish. Analysis optimizes for locating individuals rather than multi-domain missions against peer threats.
2003
Iraq's WMD program is judged with “high confidence”. It did not exist.
2007
ICD 203 codifies analytic standards, including how analysts must express uncertainty and confidence.
2022
Russia's invasion of Ukraine exposes a new state of warfare. Commercial imagery, cheap sensors, and disposable drones make the battlefield transparent and collapse sensor-to-shooter timelines into minutes.
2023
Hamas attacks from Gaza on 7 October, fifty years and a day after Yom Kippur. Warning indicators were held and discounted against a standing assessment that the threat was deterred.
2023
Peer and near-peer competitors close the gap on platforms and access. Overmatch now rests on hybrid warfare augmented by an information advantage.
2024
Non-state and irregular actors generate pressures equivalent to a pacing threat at a fraction of the cost.
2025
Dresden Codex founded to augment the analyst under pressure and under uncertainty.
The U.S. wins and dominates the next generation of warfare through sustained overmatch.